The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #99389 Message #2238293
Posted By: Simon G
17-Jan-08 - 07:19 AM
Thread Name: African Folk Songs
Subject: Funga Alaafia
Reading the messages about Alaafia quickly brought up an image of two men shaking hand for a long time in greeting. As I lived in Ghana from 5-15 this would be from then, by their clothes I would have guessed they were speaking Hausa. I'm no linguist but I would guess from memory its tonal and should be low, high, medium, medium
Hausa is the lingua franca of a large swathe of West Africa, the equivalent of Swahili in East Africa. As a greeting word ("well being" seem to be the most common meaning)it has been taken up by other languages including Yoruba. Hausa is from Niger and Northern Nigeria, the Yoruba are immediately south in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana.
This could be a Yoruba chant taken up by Hausa traders and moved west, but would that get to Liberia, not sure Hausa as a lingua franca gets that far. Maybe it went across the Atlantic and came back with the freed slaves shipped to Liberia, assuming the chant is that old. Much more likely is its been taken up in the USA and mis-attributed.
I'm from England, born in Lancashire. I'd find it rather simplistic if there was a thread on here asking for European Folk Songs, or even possibly British Folk Songs. Surely folk songs are a cultural thing and belong to a particular culture. Just like Europe, Africa has a huge range of cultures and languages; in fact I would suspect it is more diverse than Europe.
I think I go further and say we wouldn't even dream of categorising folk songs on a continental basis for any other continent, Asian, South American. I wonder why we don't recognise the cultural diversity of Africa, even in simplistic terms. I think the web is starting to change this, you can find a growing amount of information on individual languages; lets hope cultural information including song follows.